In his poem An Arundel Tomb, Philip Larkin wrote that “what will survive of us is love” – a thought, that he said was “almost true”. But what will certainly survive of this and future generations is the content we create over years and decades of online activity. With the inevitable effect of time, Facebook and the other social media sites will turn into what some people call “digital graveyards”.

I’d argue that’s entirely the wrong analogy to draw. In respect to the dead, graves and graveyards do two things that the internet does not do. Firstly, they unambiguously mark the end of a life. Every gravemaker is a full-stop, plain for all to see. Secondly, they clearly separate the dead from the living. The latter may visit, but only the former remain.

The internet, though, is a place where our digital selves continue unmarked by our mortality. From Facebook friends to Twitter followers to the contacts on our mobile phones, the dead reside in ever greater numbers alongside the living – and superficially indistinguishable.

Suggested reading

Silicon Valley's 'suicide pill' for mankind

By Mark Piesing

The distinctions and separations we so carefully maintain in the real world are being eroded in cyberspace. In the process we are violating one of the deepest and oldest taboos known to mankind.

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Back in the 1990s, not long after the fall of Communism, I was introduced to some Romanians who were visiting the UK for the first time. I asked them where in Romania they came from. Transylvania, they replied. They were surprised that so many people they’d met in England claimed to know the place. When I explained why that might be, they expressed some exasperation. And fair enough. How would you like it if your homeland was only known around the world for its darkest folklore – and, even worse, folklore chewed up and regurgitated by a foreign author?

Though Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula is very loosely inspired by Romanian history – in particular the 15th century ruler Vlad Tepes (a.k.a. ‘Vlad the Impaler’) – there’s nothing especially Romanian or Transylvanian about vampires. The word ‘vampire’ is not of Romanian origin; it came to us via French and German from the Slavic world (and before that, even further east). In fact, myths about vampires and vampire-like creatures are remarkably widespread – most cultures have them – and many stretch back into pre-history.

Suggested reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

These weren’t just stories to tell around the campfire. The evidence is that our ancestors were genuinely terrified that the dead would walk and prey upon the living – as attested to by the discovery of graves containing staked and decapitated skeletons. But why were our ancestors so terrified of the undead? Weren’t the times they lived in violent enough without having to invent mythical foes? From a modern day perspective, it all seems so irrational.

And yet that’s to forget that they had to deal with a dangerous world they couldn’t analyse scientifically – and that what they did learn (the hard way, through experience), they could only pass on by word of mouth.

Consider for instance, their experience of disease. The absence of modern medical knowledge didn’t just leave them struggling to treat illness, but also to explain it: A bigger, deadlier threat than man or beast, but also silent, invisible, unfathomable. Without an understanding of microbes, what explanations would you reach for?

Now consider death itself, not the spiritual mysteries of life and afterlife, but the immediate fact of the human body and what happens to it after its final breath. There is, of course, the ghastly pallor of death – and the coldness and rigor mortis. Tissues begin to shrivel, teeth become bared and appear more prominent; and it may seem as if hair and nails continue to grow. Most horribly, gases build up within the body – causing movement, making sounds, and perhaps forcing blood from the mouth. Death may bring stillness first, but with the process of decay comes transformation and the suggestion of restlessness. To imagine the dead as undead is surely not such a leap.

And nor, I’d argue, is making a link between the undead and the inexplicable life-sapping effects of disease upon the living. The dead do not get up and prey upon us, but they are a potential source of contamination.

Put all of that together and one can begin to understand how vampire myths got their start in so many different places around the world. And, how, in reinforcing certain taboos – for instance those concerning cannibalism, contact with the dead and the proper disposal of bodies – they also served a useful purpose.

*

I wonder, though, if our fear of the dead (and, in particular, our fear of the dead come back to a semblance of life) – goes further than matters of cleanliness and hygiene.

Suggested reading

How we lost the undefiled moment

By Douglas Murray

In Darwinian terms, death serves a vital purpose in making room for the next generation, another throw of the genetic dice, another chance to evolve and move on. Much the same can be said about the evolution of human culture.

You may have heard it argued that because older people are more likely than the young to have voted to Leave the EU, and also more likely to have died since the 2016 referendum, we should therefore hold the vote again. It’s a specious argument, and a nasty one – but buried within its ugliness there is a grain of truth. While we shouldn’t begrudge the votes of those in life’s departure lounge, imagine our society if the Edwardians were still with us – and the Victorians, Georgians, Stuarts, Tudors and so on. The architecture would be better, but Jacob Rees Mogg would be considered a dangerous liberal.

One of my university professors once began a lecture with these words: “It is estimated that since our species evolved, 77 billion human beings have been born… fortunately, most of the buggers are dead.” Harsh, but fair.

Of course, we honour those who have gone before us. We inherit a tradition and hopefully add to it and pass it on. In our personal lives, we grieve for those we lose and hold them, happily or unhappily, in our memories. Many of us believe in an afterlife and in some faiths, such as Catholicism, the faithful departed are not just remembered but also prayed for: “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord. Let perpetual light shine upon them.”

However, the idea of the dead breaking back into our lives is a deeply disturbing one. In both the Old and New Testaments, we are warned against the use of mediums to contact the spirits of the dead. The book of Ecclesiastes says this of the departed: “their love, their hatred, and their envy have now perished; nevermore will they have a share in anything done under the sun.”

Suggested reading

Does a big society need a Big God?

By Peter Franklin

In the Western tradition, and elsewhere, a firm line is drawn between this world and what comes after – and if the dead breach it or become somehow trapped between the two, it is in ghostly or ghoulish form: both horrifying and insubstantial, as if to underscore their lack of belonging.

That the resurgence in spiritualism and seances in the 19th and early 20th century coincided with the decline of traditional Christian belief is surely not unrelated. As faith faltered, the demand grew for physical ‘evidence’ of the survival of the soul beyond death. As GK Chesterton remarked in 1924: “The nineteenth century decided to have no religious authority. The twentieth century seems disposed to have any religious authority.”

For a while, Spiritualism acquired a semi-respectability, attracting famous adherents such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Russel Wallace and William T Stead. However, the moment passed. Mediumship continues, but has been relegated to the fringes. The ‘age of reason’ has reasserted the old separation between this life and the next – if only by disbelieving in the latter.

*

But could technology reawaken the dead? I believe it could – not literally, of course, but by reanimating our digital remains. What we currently leave behind us online may be extensive, but as things stand the dead cannot be said to be active on social media. Unless someone does it for them, their profiles will not be updated, their emails will go answered, and their mentions unacknowledged. Through our gadgets, we can pre-program certain actions before we die, but thereafter we can take no more decisions.

Artificial intelligence could change that. Last year I wrote about the concept of “augmented eternity” – the application of AI to our online activities. I raised the grim prospect of Donald Trump continuing to tweet from beyond the grave forever.

Within a few decades, it’s entirely plausible that the current generation of digital assistants will evolve into sophisticated AI agents, capable of acting on our behalf in all sorts of online situations – from completing our tax returns to arranging our meetings and appointments. They’ll have state-of-the-art language processing skills and be capable of composing emails and answering calls. We’ll find them immensely useful; indeed, we’ll be lost without them. They, however, will be able to continue without us – surviving online long after we’ve departed this world.

Suggested reading

Could Trump keep tweeting for ever?

By Peter Franklin

Having managed our social media activity while we’re alive, there’s no reason why they couldn’t continue to do so when we’re dead. They may not be capable of writing the most original of tweets, but then neither are most Twitter users. In short, should we wish it, AI will be more than able to keep us active online – death no object.

But why? What would be the point?

Well, there is an obvious motivation: to be remembered. If you believe that you only live on in the memory of others, then AI-powered social media is your best shot at immortality.

The internet is already a competition for the world’s attention. Before long, the living will compete against an army of digitally undead.

Recessions can also blight the the future prospects of individuals – especially those looking for a job just as the shutters come down. It’s not the temporary loss of income that matters, but also the permanent gaps in the accumulation of experience.

Some groups suffer more than others. For instance, if a recession accelerates the decline of an already ailing traditional industry, then workers might have a hard time finding jobs in the new industries that lead the recovery. Thus we might expect older members of the workforce to feel the worst long-term effects. To trot out another dubious cliche: ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’

Further Reading

The mystery of the disappearing pay rise

By Peter Franklin

Evidence from the US economy contradicts that lazy assumption. America is creating jobs fast – many parts of the country are at full employment or close to it. Yet, as Jeannie Smialek explains in an important piece for Bloomberg, it appears to be the young not the old who’ve been left behind – at least among the male workforce:

“Men – long America’s economically privileged gender – have been dogged in recent decades by high incarceration and swollen disability rates. They hemorrhaged high-paying jobs after technology and globalization hit manufacturing and mining.

“The young ones have fared particularly badly. Many of them exited high school into a world short on middle-skill job opportunities, only to be broadsided by the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

Moreover, they’ve been slowest to recover from this economic catastrophe. Compared to 2007, the labour force participation rate is nearly two percentage points up for men aged 55 to 64, but three percentage points down for men aged 25-34.

That drop equates to 500,000 young(ish) men ‘missing’ from the labour market.

What about their female contemporaries? Have they also been left behind by the recovery? No, the participation rate for women aged 25-34 is up by nearly two percentage points on pre-recession levels.

Furthermore, the gap in participation rates between younger men and the next age group (35-44 year olds), which widened during the recession has yet to close – unlike the gap between the corresponding female age groups.

We are now several years into the recovery, but these figures suggest that there is a group of Millennial males who have not recovered – and who, though still young, aren’t getting any younger:

“’At some point, you can have a bit of an effect of a lost generation,’ according to David Dorn, an economist at the University of Zurich. “If you get to the point where you’re turning 30, you’ve never held a real job and you don’t have a college education, then it is very hard to recover at that point.’”

To be clear, these individuals represent a minority of their peers. However, their numbers are concentrated among the least advantaged sections of society:

“About 14 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds with just a high-school degree weren’t in the labor force in 2016, up from 6.4 percent in 1996, according to Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City analysis by economist Didem Tuzemen.”

Some researchers suggest that young men are disproportionately shifting their time to “video gaming and other recreational computer activities”. Others disagree, saying that this age group are rejecting dead-end jobs that do nothing to improve long-term earning potential – with computer games and other diversions filling their time by default.

Further Reading

Are low-paid workers unskilled or just undervalued?

By Peter Franklin

Whatever the causal direction, we’ve embarked upon a civilisational experiment: to find out what happens if a society takes the rewards and respect out of ordinary jobs while at the time increasing the affordability and sophistication of its distractions.

If ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ what will ‘all play and no work’ do to him?

The answer is that they were all born in the same year, 1946. It’s a coincidence that illustrates the enduring power of the Baby Boomers – the post-war generation born between 1945 and 1965. That makes Barack Obama (born 1961) a Boomer too, though one of the younger ones.

The next generation – ie ‘Generation X’, born between 1965 and 1980 – may have to wait some time for its turn in the White House. Even if Trump is not re-elected in 2020, most of the likely alternatives are also Baby Boomers (or even, like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, pre-boomer war babies.

Suggested reading

Boomer populism is a warning from the future

By Peter Franklin

Therefore, it might not be until 2024 or 2028 that a Gen Xer gets a crack at the Presidency. However, by that time the older members of the generation after X – the ‘Millennials’ born between 1980 and 1995 – will be old enough to run for the top job. This raises the alarming prospect that there will never be a Generation X President of the United States.

Why should that matter? A new book by Matthew Hennessey, deputy op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal explains what’s so special about an often overlooked generation. Entitled Zero Hour for GenX: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials it is reviewed for the American Conservative by Charles F McElwee:

“Hennessey… argues that Generation X is the country’s greatest check on a dystopian technological future. It is Gen Xers who can recall life before Big Tech’s omniscience, restores values extinguished by modern norms, and bridge the gap between Boomers’ lingering hubris and Millennials’ infectious callowness. Theirs is a generation victimized by timing—too young for the halcyon ’90s, profoundly traumatized by 9/11 and the Great Recession, and immobilized by the present turbulent age.”

The tech bit is certainly true. Gen X (to which I belong) was the last generation (in the developed world) to have an analogue childhood. There was no internet, no mobile phones and no social media. As for computer games, those were around, but on steam age storage media – like cassette tapes that would take ages to load (providing the tape didn’t get chewed up by the player and your dad’s computer didn’t crash).

Suggested reading

The hermit generation: The young aren’t rebelling against society, but hiding from it

By Peter Franklin

Of course, it wasn’t just Gen X who lived through the subsequent digital transition – everyone older than us did too (if they were paying attention). But I think it meant more to us because it coincided with our own transition from infancy. We literally matured with the technology.

McElwee says that Gen X grew up with “just the right dose of technology”. I’m not sure about that, but at least we know the difference between the digital and pre-digital worlds. Gen X are the first-generation settlers of cyberspace, with an appreciation of what we’ve gained as a result – and what we’ve lost:

“Baby Boomers, now seniors, seem unconcerned with Big Tech’s grip on society. After all, passively scrolling on an iPad is a leisure, not a burden. Millennials, meanwhile, have surrendered themselves to a pixelated existence. Life has become digital, told in short stories and filtered photos for hidden, dopamine-feeding advertisers.

“…In response to this rapid change, Hennessey believes Generation X must remind society of forgotten behaviors, products, and standards…”

Of course, not every Baby Boomer is disengaged from this issue, nor is every Millennial (and Post-millennial) so glued to their screen as not to notice the outside world. Yet Hennessey is on to something when he says that “the members of Generation X have an awesome responsibility to keep faith with reality”.

Admittedly, this overlooks the central role that television played in warping our ideas of reality, but at least the one-eyed monster – unlike the smartphone – didn’t follow us around. It was possible to head out into the world without a digital tether. And despite the lack of a constant connection to home, school and friends, we generally had more freedom to explore the world than today’s young people. 

Suggested reading

Why don't we talk about television anymore?

By Peter Franklin

I suspect we also had a greater inclination to use (and abuse) this latitude. Because diversion wasn’t available at the swipe of a screen, we lived with the ever-present threat of pure, undistracted boredom. When we couldn’t escape it, we had to put up with it – an invaluable test for any young mind; and in some cases, a spur to creativity and/or mischief.

So, perhaps, Matthew Hennessey is right. The on-coming wave of Gen X leaders could provide the refresh that our Boomer-dominated political system so desperately needs.

One word of warning though. For all, the nice things that can be said about Gen Xers, the fact is that crime rates peaked just as we reached adolescence / early adulthood. That makes us the most delinquent, and indeed violent, generation in modern history.

Perhaps we should skip to the gentle Millennials after all.

That’s an argument I made back in June, unpacking a piece by Jamie Bartlett on Simon Cowell’s non-use of his smart phone.

Further reading

Do you have to be rich not to have a smartphone?

By Peter Franklin

Writing for the New York Times, Nellie Bowles is in similar territory – noting that the children of the poor spend more time glued to screens than the children of the rich:

“Lower-income teenagers spend an average of eight hours and seven minutes a day using screens for entertainment, while higher income peers spend five hours and 42 minutes, according to research by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit media watchdog… Two studies that look at race have found that white children are exposed to screens significantly less than African-American and Hispanic children.”

The old concern that the under-privileged would be excluded from cyberspace now looks entirely misplaced:

“It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.”

Bowles describes how groups of parents are banding together to detach their children from addictive technology:

“…they needed strength in numbers. First, because no one wants their kid to be the lone weird one without a phone. And second, because taking the phone away from a middle schooler is actually very, very tough.”

She writes that “parents say there is a growing technological divide between public and private schools” – where it is schools for poorer kids putting screens in class rooms, while the exclusive institutions keep it out. In another article for the NYT, she reveals that nannies employed by Silicon Valley professionals are instructed to “keep phones, tablets, computers and TVs off and hidden at all times”.

Further reading

'Alexa, are you turning my kid into a brat?'

By Peter Franklin

Apart from the stinking hypocrisy of it all, the obvious concern is one of inequality. It’s not just that most parents can’t afford a nanny, but technology often serves as a substitute for childcare and parental attention – especially in those households where those resources are at their most stretched.

The irony is that it could be technology that comes to the rescue. As digital assistants become more sophisticated, they will serve as ‘shepherds’ for all the electronic devices in our homes – for instance turning them on and off as required. They could also become ‘cyber-nannies’, controlling the way that children in the household access technology – if nothing else, by automatically enforcing strict limits on screen time. Indeed, digital assistants (once bolstered by advances in artificial intelligence) could act as our agents in cyberspace – taking the time-sucking complexity out of our digital interactions. Instead of us depending on ‘platforms’ (such as Facebook and Uber) that ultimately serve their owners’ purposes not ours, our super smart digital assistants would do our bidding and serve our priorities.

Further reading

Platform cooperativism – an alternative to technopoly

By Peter Franklin

But who is going to develop these artificially intelligent factotums? Looking at the digital assistants already in our homes and on our phones, it is the usual line-up of tech giants. And as long Silicon Valley business models are based on commanding our attention and controlling our information, we can’t rely on them to make non-addictive (or, better still, anti-addictive) products.

In time, the kings of the distraction economy may find more subtle means to colonise our minds than the blatant manipulations of the present, but I still wouldn’t trust them.

Other business models are possible. It’s interesting to see Apple placing such an emphasis on data privacy. Perhaps we’ll see companies developing digital assistants that really do make us masters of our technological destiny – for instance, by fully cooperating with parents who wanted to raise their children free of damaging technological distractions.

The risk is that these would be premium products – with poorer parents relying on ‘free’ cyber-nannies that sell their children’s attention and information to the highest bidder.

If this is how personal tech develops in the years ahead, then there is a case for government intervention. In the future, universal access to high-quality, non-treacherous AI may be the best guarantor of equality.

The sequence of tweets came from Jamie Bartlett, author of The People Vs Tech, and his starting point was the shattering revelation that Cowell no longer uses a smartphone:

“Simon Cowell has given his smartphone up for 10 months and is apparently *delighted*. This got me thinking about a potential new inequality between the tech-haves and tech-havenots.”

Bartlett observes that going offline is easy when you’ve got PAs, PRs and every other kind of flunky running your life.

I’m sure it is, but it was the next tweet that made me sit up:

“The assumption 10 years ago was that rich people would have all the great tech and poor people wouldn’t. What if it’s the opposite? Rich people can afford to have a more healthy relationship with devices, and most of us (for reasons of convenience, necessity or cost) cannot.”

It’s a fascinating theory, and one that reflects our cultural slide towards techno-pessimism, but how true is it?

Work pressures can certainly keep people tethered to their screens. And if you organise your life online, then a smartphone – as your all-in-one diary, address book, to-do list, library, notepad, photo album, record collection and shopping catalogue – is essential (unless you have your own ‘people’ to do it all for you).

However, in this respect, our smartphone use is a digital substitute for the analogue things we’d be doing anyway – and, in fact, were doing in the before-time. The real problem with smartphones derives from those capabilities that have no analogue precedent – above all the social media. It is these that represent the biggest waste of time, the most insistent sources of distraction, the deadliest seeds of addiction.

Further reading

Many in the tech industry are avoiding their products. Should we do the same?

By Peter Franklin

And yet these aspects of the digital experience are also the most unnecessary. You really don’t have to be rich to do without them: delete your Facebook account, come off Twitter, and the sun still rises. Though you may have to use social media for work purposes, it’s not that difficult to filter your exposure only to what you need to know about. Indeed, many employers find it necessary to compel such restrictions in the workplace.

So why don’t we detach ourselves from the digital umbilicus (at least, for some of the time)? It’s not that we can’t, because not so long ago it didn’t exist and yet, somehow, we got through each day. In fact, it was only the rich who lived in a bubble of constant electronic communication. The idea that you now have to be rich not to, is less than convincing.

But if affordability isn’t the issue, how else can we explain the elitist nature of the ‘digital detox’?

My guess is that it’s part of a older, broader pattern: the tendency of the rich to reject luxuries that become abundant. Luxuries aren’t just valued because they’re luxurious, but also because they serve as positional goods. Possessing them signals your status, including to yourself. However, once everybody has them, they lose that value.

Further reading

Should the rich be allowed to destroy their own wealth?

By Peter Franklin

White bread was once a luxury. But when the mechanisation of the sifting process allowed white flour to be mass produced, it became a staple of the poor. To the extent that the rich eat bread at all – the carbs! the carbs! – their loaves of choice resemble what was once called ‘horsebread‘ .

Lack of physical exertion was another privilege reserved for the (idle) rich. Now, it’s considered to be a widespread social problem. Today’s elites, meanwhile, pay aggressive men to shout at them to work harder, run faster and lift heavier weights – which the average peasant used to get for free.

I can’t help thinking that digital falls into the same category. In an age of ubiquitous connectivity, the new positional good is to be disconnected. 

Further reading

Why 'enough' is the most dangerous word in economics

By Peter Franklin

Oh, those excrutiatingly subtle Japanese! How lucky we are in the West to have the straightforward, egalitarian handshake.

Sorry, a bit of (British) irony there. Japanese bowing etiquette is, of course, a formal expression of what we all do informally i.e. modulate our behaviour towards others according to how we evaluate our relationship with them. This applies as much to the organisations we interact with as it does to individuals. And, as with individuals, we like to know where we stand – especially with those organisations that have the greatest presence in our lives.

Given how much of our lives are now lived online, our relationships to social media companies are correspondingly important – and yet the nature of that relationship is notoriously unclear. You may be a Facebook user, but as you don’t pay for the service can you really think of yourself as a Facebook customer? But if not a customer, then what are you?

The newly received wisdom is that ‘you are the product’, but is that true?

In a thought-provoking essay for Slate, Will Oremus tracks down the origin of the phrase and goes on to question its validity:

“It’s easy to see why ’you are the product’ is so resonant these days. In a time of confusing data-privacy scandals and mysterious machine-learning algorithms, it offers a deliciously simple explanation for internet companies’ alleged misdeeds. Facebook doesn’t really care about its users, the saying implies, because they’re not the ones ultimately opening their wallets; advertisers are. We’d be fools to expect otherwise from a free service!”

It’s not that Oremus entirely disagrees. The problem with being ‘products’, however, is that products don’t fight back:

“It’s 2018, and it’s time for Facebook’s critics to move past what has become a tired cliché. There’s something nihilistic about telling people they’re the product of a gigantic corporation and there’s nothing they can do about it. ‘You are the product’ paints us as powerless pawns in Facebook’s game but gives us no leverage with which to improve our predicament.”

Perhaps we should see ourselves as slaves – rebellious ones:

“Just as bees labor unwittingly on beekeepers’ behalf, our posts and status updates continually enrich Facebook. But we’re humans, not bees, and as such we have the capacity to collectively demand better treatment. The technologist and activist Jaron Lanier, carrying this analogy to its logical conclusion in the book Who Owns the Future?, suggested that users of Facebook and other data-hungry online services rise up and demand actual monetary compensation for their data.”

It’s true that Facebook’s content is substantially user-generated, but then that’s what Facebook is for – it is a tool that enables people to share information. A vacuum cleaner is a tool for cleaning carpets (and pretty useless if not used for that purpose) – but does that mean James Dyson should pay us for doing our housework?

Even if we were paid for the content we create online, its market value would, in most cases, be so small that we’d need to bring back the mite.

Perhaps we could be seen as ‘paying’ for our use of social media in other ways – for instance in the time we spend consuming other people’s content (including adverts) or in the information we allow the social media companies to harvest from us? Oremus argues that these things ‘cost’ us and therefore we can rightly see ourselves as customers (who are owed the respect normally due from a supplier).

The trouble with this argument is that these costs don’t really accrue to the individual user. Yes, spending too much time on Facebook isn’t good for you, but nor is playing computer games all night or eating too much chocolate. It is not your over-consumption of a product that makes you a customer, but the fact that you purchased it – except that, in the case of Facebook, you didn’t.

As for the issue of personal data and privacy – there is no cost unless the data is misused in some way (better targeted advertising hardly counts). One could argue that the issue is not the cost to the user, but the unpaid-for benefit to the social media company. But again, individual payments would be tiny and, in any case, the social media company provides a service in return – i.e. free access to the site .

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the tech lords aren’t acquiring enormous power to make and manipulate markets (or even electorates). Nor do I deny their unprecedented influence over the flow of information or the devastating impact that online advertising has had on print journalism. As for the impact of social media on our culture or its combined ‘distraction effect’ on our economic productivity, those too are real concerns.

Recommended reading

Are ‘cyberslackers’ destroying the economy? 

By Peter Franklin

However, all of these costs are primarily collective – affecting individuals whether they choose to use social media or not. The tax avoidance for which the tech sector is infamous only adds insult to the injury.

It is therefore as nations, not individuals, that we need to deal with the tech companies – and we need leaders with the brains and the guts to get a better one. 

Writing for the Globe and Mail, Michael Harris confesses all:

“Turning, one evening, from my phone to a book, I set myself the task of reading a single chapter in one sitting. Simple. But I couldn’t. There was nothing wrong with my eyes. No stroke or disease clouded my way. Yet – if I’m being honest – the failure was also not a surprise.

“Paragraphs swirled; sentences snapped like twigs; and sentiments bled out. The usual, these days. I drag my vision across the page and process little. Half an hour later, I throw down the book and watch some Netflix.”

Note the giveaway phrase: “turning, one evening, from my phone to a book…”

Harris argues that reading from our screens is impairing our ability – or, at least, our willingness to read from books:

“…online life makes me into a different kind of reader – a cynical one. I scrounge, now, for the useful fact; I zero in on the shareable link. My attention – and thus my experience – fractures. Online reading is about clicks, and comments, and points. When I take that mindset and try to apply it to a beaten-up paperback, my mind bucks…

“…So, I throw down the old book, craving mental Tabasco sauce. And yet not every emotion can be reduced to an emoji, and not every thought can be conveyed via tweet.”

The brevity and ephemerality of tweets and texts may be a reason why we ought to read books, but is it why we’re less able to?

Some people think the impact of digital on our reading habits goes well beyond the distraction effect of social media (that great thief of our undivided attention). The theory is that our very brains are being rewired:

“…there’s a great deal of reporting now – from neuroscientists such as Susan Greenfield and Gary Small – to show that digital native brains do engage in concretely different ways from those of previous generations. Spend 10 hours a day staring at screens and – yes – your synapses will adapt.”

Harris goes on to quote Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google:

“He once told Charlie Rose: ‘I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information … is in fact affecting cognition. It is affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we’re losing that.’”

As we’ve noted before, Schmidt is not the only big tech luminary to express concern about the impact of digital on human cognition.

Recommended reading

Many in the tech industry are avoiding their products. Should we do the same?

By Peter Franklin

The new technology isn’t solely to blame. Too many books are basically articles padded out to book length; so it’s no wonder we lose patience with them. Admittedly, many articles are tweets padded out to article-length, but because we increasingly consume these shorter items online, we can instantly act upon our frustration – either clicking elsewhere or using some form of online interaction make our feelings known.

Books, however, are resolutely non-interactive – at least not in a public sense. Any input from the reader is limited to his or her private thoughts (or scribbles in the margin).

Reading a book, even when not a frustrating experience, is a humbling one. The reader is required to sit down, shut up and pay attention to someone else.

In the age of the selfie, that might just be the biggest problem.